Category: Blog

Please see attached this report by Médecins Sans Frontières, “The Less-Told Migration Story and its Humanitarian Consequences: An MSF Canada report on the global displacement crisis,” looking at the human and humanitarian impact of the current global approach to migrants and refugees and the urgency to stop policies and practices that harm the wellbeing of people in flight and exacerbate their already vulnerable situation.

Doctors Without Borders/Meìdecins Sans FrontieÌres (MSF)’s work with refugees and displaced people has shown that humane and dignified treatment, as well as access to medical care, contributes to the wellbeing of migrants and their wider communities. Too often, however, we instead witness the negative health and psychological impact that border-control measures can have on this highly vulnerable group. People fleeing war and hardship often experience deleterious health conditions throughout irregular migratory journeys. Many leave their home countries in order to escape immediate harm, only to find themselves stuck inside conflict zones, trapped precariously in transit, sent to detention centres or housed indefinitely in underserved refugee camps. In this paper, MSF shines a light on the difficult experiences of people in flight who are prevented from reaching their desired destination country because of hardened policies including physical barriers, detention and interdiction measures. It surveys problematic or incoherent policies and practices in Europe, Canada and other countries — and also considers some positive examples of refugee reception. We call for a coherent and humane response to the current global displacement crisis.

“Yet standing in Wilde’s cell reflecting on what those laws had meant to him, even after his release from prison, I also realized what he shared with a group of people today who are incarcerated for doing nothing wrong — migrants inBritain— and saw the limits of the progress marked by his pardon.

I had previously thought of Wilde as a man who went into exile after completing his prison term. But when Wilde went to France, where it wasn’t a crime to be gay, he was a man fleeing unjust laws that could be used to persecute him. He was no exile; he was a refugee.”

The analogy described in this article could apply to the five Australian immigration detention centres and to Nauru’s three off-shore regional processing centres I have visited in the past weeks. Several detainees told me that prison is better as one knows why one’s detained and when it will end. One day, an apology will be in order.

Cover page of the Amnesty International Report on Human Rights violations related to the EU hotspot system.

Amnesty International published yesterday a new report on the human rights violations linked to the EU hotspot system in Italy. The report demonstrates that a host of human rights violations are taking place in Italy, including excessive use of force by police, arbitrary detention and collective expulsions, and details serious allegations of torture and other forms of ill-treatment. The Italy-Sudan recent readmission agreement is also discussed in detail.

Encouraging and publicising individual initiatives by citizens actually doing something for refugees and migrants is the best way to respond to nationalist populist politicians and demonstrate that not everyone buys their “post-truth” hate and fear rhetoric. See an excerpt from this blog post by Hein de Haas below:

“While migration has become a political ‘hot topic’, public debates about migration have often remained remarkably fact-less. Thanks to the increase in migration research and availability of data, we know much more about the trends, causes and impacts of migration than a few decades ago. However, this knowledge does often not reach the broader public. This is highly unfortunate, since modern migration scholarship has so much to offer in order to facilitate informed debates and better, more effective policies.

Part of the blame lies with politicians, who willingly ignore inconvenient evidence that would unveil their demagoguery and unnerve their migration scaremongering and scapegoating of migrants.

All too often, the news media buy into – and thereby reinforce – the fact-free crisis narrative around migration fed to them by politicians. Many journalists fail in their basic professional duty of fact checking. A case in point is the false political claim that the EU-Turkey ‘deal’ on refugees has stopped refugee migration from Syria.

However, part of the blame also lies with migration researchers, who often fail to communicate their findings in clear, jargon-free language to the broader public, while research papers often remain inaccessible behind prohibitive paywalls of scientific journals. Much knowledge about migration therefore never leaves the academic ivory tower.”

Please see this fine analysis of the new EU PNR Directive from a human rights perspective.

“According to the PNR (Passenger Name Record) Directive 2016/681 of 27 April 2016, a series of everyday data of all air passengers (third-country nationals but also EU citizens, including those on intra-Schengen flights) will soon be transferred to specialised units to be analysed in order to identify persons of interest in relation to terrorist offences and other serious crimes. This new instrument raises once again fundamental rights challenges posed by its future operation, particularly in relation to privacy and citizenship rights. Therefore, the story of the PNR Directive, as described below, is probably not finished as such concerns open up the possibility of a future involvement of the Court of Justice.”